A girl in a worn skirt and wrinkled blouse handed around a cap, but the haphazard audience, two sailors and a whore, only made fun of the poet. After he was done, Genya introduced us. The poet was Anton Chernikov, the editor of their journal and the leader of their group. I was dismayed by his look of frank horror as he took in my neat shoes, my hat, my hair, and the kiss Genya planted on my neck, his arm around me. I knew I had little hope of ever winning him over. His sneering face would never accept me, the bourgeois miss. More personable was a tall strapping paint-splattered blond, Sasha Orlovsky, an artist, and Gigo Gelashvili, an earnest, shock-haired Georgian poet. He had a gift for rhyme, and a little crowd gathered as he recited—a woman selling pirozhky, a drunk, and two dockworkers. I looked up to see if Blok would appear in his fifth-floor window, but the curtains remained drawn.

The girl with the cap was called Zina Ostrovskaya. She said nothing at all when Genya introduced us, just stared in disgust. She reminded me of a small vicious animal, like a mink or a ferret. Her poetry, when it was her turn, proved sharp and political. But Genya was their star. People heard him a block away and came to investigate. Idlers stopped to listen in the warm afternoon. The whores especially admired him. He incorporated everything from zaum to the language of the street, biblical cadences and Russian mythology. As a finale, he sang a sailors’ song to the tune of the Orthodox liturgy, which brought shouts of encouragement and a clattering of coins from the loitering sailors and longshoremen.

Afterward they lounged in the sun and counted their money, ate sandwiches out of their pockets. It seemed that the Transrational Interlocutors, or at least their core group, lived together near Haymarket Square in a place they called the Poverty Artel, an artel being a small factory, which in this case produced poetry. “We pool our poverty and divide it among our members,” Genya joked. I wondered if these street-corner performances were enough to live on.

“Oh, we do all kinds of things,” he said. “Painting houses, putting up handbills. Anything people have for us.”

And how had they managed to avoid the draft? He shrugged. “Gigo and Sasha have student deferments. I’m an only son. Anton here was discharged for mental instability.”

“Unsuitability for service,” corrected the scowling avant-gardist, crushing out a cigarette.

“The apartment’s in Anton’s name.” My new love tossed a piece of his sandwich to a strutting seagull. “Nobody’s registered but him, just in case the government changes its mind. Makes us a little harder to find.”

I wanted to visit the Poverty Artel, but Genya was oddly shy about letting me come over. I couldn’t understand. I had no compunctions about being alone with him, about moving on from kisses to love. I even made Seryozha go to a drugstore and buy condoms, over his vociferous protests. I had to bribe him with a set of pastels. What was Genya waiting for? “It’s a flophouse,” he said. “You don’t want to see that.” And when he walked me home to Furshtatskaya Street that day, and we kissed in the parkway under the bright-leaved trees, I asked him to come up with me. He gazed at the fancy plasterwork and the iron balconies, at a woman coming out to walk two matched Borzois, and shook his head. “I’m not going in there.”

“Come in the back way then. That’s what Varvara does.” And then into my salmon-pink boudoir.

“I don’t go in the back way,” he said stiffly.

I was mortified. I had offended him, suggesting he use the servants’ entry. “Well, come in the front, then, and meet my mother.”

“Some other time,” he said, chastely kissing my temple.

Yet later from our windows I caught sight of him, loitering in the park strip under the shade of the burgeoning trees.


I sat at my place at dinner, imagining how this would all look to Genya: Mother in her filmy summer organza; Father relating amusing anecdotes about the foreign office; Tripov the art collector, his fat fingers bedecked with rings; the Gromitskys quarreling about their visit to Capri; Basya in a starched apron and cap, handing around asparagus. How Genya would mock all this, and rightly so. The chatter and clatter of silverware seemed almost unbearable to me now, the ludicrous epergne spilling over with roses, the chandelier whose crystals Basya had to disassemble and soak one by one. These days it was becoming dusty. She did as little as possible, and with ever greater insolence—Mother was becoming afraid of her. The revolutionary feeling was growing in the city, even in her own home. I could see my mother’s eyes stray from time to time to the chandelier, to the little strings of dust, and I noticed that she avoided looking into Basya’s face as she offered more wine. I missed what people were saying as they tried to draw me out. I was further and further away, thinking about Genya waiting for me in the parkway, in the silvery White Night. Tonight I would make love with him. Even if it was behind a statue in the Summer Garden.

Finally the dishes were cleared, and I seized the moment to flee. I threw on a light shawl and ran down to Furshtatskaya Street. It was almost ten, a warm June evening—bright enough to read a newspaper. The leaves cast shadows on the ground. For a moment I thought he hadn’t come. But there he was, standing under a tree in the eerie dappled shade of the northern summer evening. I ran to him, kissed him breathlessly, tilting my face up to him as if I were trying to kiss the sky.

We walked together slowly through the cool silvery streets toward the Summer Garden. He kept stopping to look at me, or walked backward in front of me. How different it was to be with Genya. When I’d been with Kolya, I’d been the moon, and he was the sun: he could give me his warmth or withhold it, pursue me or forget me. Genya bent toward me as if I were the source of light. Strange—for once I didn’t feel the impulse to show off for him. Mother always scolded me for my blurtings, my “antics,” my tendency to tell people more than they ever wanted to know. “One attracts others with mystery,” she said, “not by turning one’s pockets inside out.” Genya treated me as if I were as mysterious as a hidden spring. I loved seeing myself through his eyes. Everything around us shimmered in this dream light. I felt drunk, though I’d only had one glass of champagne. “You’re like a ghost in that dress,” he said.

“I’m a corpse—is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not a ghost then. A sleepwalker. In a white nightgown,” he said. “Barefoot, with a candle in hand.”

I’d worn a white dress intentionally. I wanted to glow in his memory, to haunt him, yes, the way Kolya had once haunted me. I hummed the dreamy grand waltz from Sleeping Beauty, taking his hand and turning under his arm.

In the Summer Garden, the unearthly twilight shifted through the old trees, illuminating the mossy sculptures lining the gravel paths. Every lover in Petrograd was out tonight, breathing with us the green of the linden trees as birdsong tumbled liquid through the air.

“I want to do something astonishing,” Genya declared. “Something heroic. Kill myself in your honor. Swim to Antarctica. Fight a duel.” He mimed fencing an imaginary adversary on my behalf. He bit the shoulder of my thin dress, tugged at it like a dog. “I’d like to tear this off with my teeth,” he said in my ear.

“Please! Not in front of Diana.” Clutching demurely at my bodice, I pointed at the glowing bare-breasted huntress with the moon in her sculpted hair.

“She doesn’t like me,” said Genya, resting his cheek on top of my head. I wasn’t a short girl but he towered above me as we gazed at the glaring goddess, poised with bow and arrow.

“She doesn’t like men.”

“And why should she? Why would any woman?” He rubbed his stubbly cheek against mine. “Big hairy protuberant fellows. Always knocking something over or giving a speech. If I were a woman I’d have nothing to do with any of us.” His breath was sweet and smelled of fennel seeds.

As a schoolgirl, I’d imagined I’d walk here someday with a lover in summer just like this… though I always pictured characters from Pushkin: a man in a swallowtail coat, me in a summer gown and bonnet. The idea of Genya in breeches and a swallowtail coat made me laugh. A bearskin and bast boots were more like it. Or chain mail.

“Come home with me tonight,” he said, in the shadows of a lesser path, leafy and fragrant. “I wish I had some better place to take you… but I told the boys to clear off. We’ll have it to ourselves.”

So it had come at last. I passed my hand back and forth, so that the shadows of the linden leaves cast their shapes on my palm. His proposal was certainly better than the idea of bringing him into my fussy bedroom with its trinkets and albums, the vanity table with all the pictures, the crocheted bedspread. He simply would not have fit.


Sadovaya Street was thick with people strolling, taking in the magical night. Haymarket Square was bustling with its long lines of stalls—vendors of pirozhky and ice cream, old clothes and hats. A potbellied man had a bear on a leash and was making it dance. Watching the bear lumbering on its hind legs—the leather collar on its neck, the chain—Genya’s eyes filled with tears. “Poor thing,” he said. “You can see how he hates this. The revolution should take bears into account.”

Suddenly, someone in the crowd behind us screamed, “Thief! He’s got my handbag!” Other people took up the cry. “Catch him!” “Get him!”

A skinny young urchin flashed by with the woman’s purse. There were no police anymore, so the crowd went running after him, men and women, baying like hounds. They soon caught the culprit—oh the shouts and the curses! They boiled up like noxious gas as they beat him, others soon joining in. Please stop it, I prayed, tears dripping down my face, clinging to Genya. It reminded me of the day of the bread riot, and how the baker had been beaten and the woman punched. “Someone’s got to stop it,” I said. The boy disappeared in their midst like a small fish in the center of a sea anemone.